So Many Tomatoes and Fermented Salsa!

Aloha friends,

​We have had a bumper crop of tomatoes! I know that sounds strange for January. What’s stranger is that we have just two tomato plants and both sprouted out of our compost pile...I kid you not. Once we realized what they were we carefully transplanted the seedlings into a large container. This was at the end of September....

Here are the same two tomato plants one month later...

They grew like crazy! The container is called an EarthBox, it’s self watering and has a reservoir that holds about 4 gallons of water. It takes a medium bag of soil and I added some granular fertilizer to it. Tomatoes seem to really like it. That and the warm Kauai sunshine.

As the tomatoes grew and produced fruit, I could tell one was a Roma (I’d been buying them at Walmart in the plastic clam shell) and the other looked like a tomato I had grown last spring that was a burgundy color only this new one was red.

Pretty soon we had tons of tomatoes! I had already given some to our neighbors and we still had more than we could eat. So, I made fermented salsa. It’s delicious, super easy and good for your belly. Here’s the recipe...

4 Cups Chopped Ripe Juicy Tomatoes
2 Tablespoons Chopped Sweet Maui Onion
2 Tablespoons Chopped Bellpepper
1 Tablespoon Chopped Cilantro
1 Tablespoon Finely Chopped Jalapeño Pepper
1 teaspoon Salt

Mix and taste it. It should taste salty but, not too salty. Put the salsa into glass jars. Press it down a bit so that the tomatoey juices cover the salsa. Cover loosely and put in a dark corner of your kitchen. Check the salsa a couple times daily just to make sure the salsa remains covered with the juices. Taste it after 24 hours to see if you like the flavor. If you like it, go ahead and cap your jars and place your salsa in the fridge. If you want it more tangy, leave it to ferment longer. I fermented my salsa about 36 hours. You can ferment it up to 5 days. The salsa will keep in your fridge up to 6 months. I made ours 3 weeks ago and it’s nearly gone. It would never last 6 months in my fridge!

Here we are now the end of January and my tomato plants are still going strong. They produced more than 120 tomatoes, I stopped counting. It’s been fun and we’ve really enjoyed the flavor of these tomatoes. I saved some seeds and already have two plants started to replace these guys once they die off. No surprise they sprouted easily.

Thanks so so much for reading my diary!